CAS CS 565, Data Mining

Course logistics
• Course webpage:
– http://www.cs.bu.edu/~evimaria/cs565-11.html
• Schedule: Mon – Wed, 2:30-4:00
• Instructor: Evimaria Terzi, evimaria@cs.bu.edu
• Office hours: Tues 11:00am-12:30pm, Wed
4:00pm-5:30pm (or by appointment)
• Mailing list : cascs565a1-l@bu.edu
 Topics to be covered (tentative)
• Introduction to data mining and prototype problems
• Frequent pattern mining
– Frequent itemsets and association rules
• Clustering
• Dimensionality reduction
• Classification
• Link analysis ranking
• Recommendation systems
• Time-series data
• Privacy-preserving data mining
 Course workload
• Three programming assignments (30%)
• Three problem sets (20%)
• Midterm exam (20%)
• Final exam (30%)
• Late assignment policy: 10% per day up to
three days; credit will be not given after that
• Incompletes will not be given
 Textbooks
• D. Hand, H. Mannila and P. Smyth: Principles of
Data Mining. MIT Press, 2001

• Jiawer Han and Micheline Kamber: Data Mining:

Concepts and Techiques. Second Edition.
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, March 2006

• Toby Segaran: Programming Collective Intelligence:

Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. O’Reilly

• Research papers (pointers will be provided)

 Prerequisites
• Basic algorithms: sorting, set manipulation, hashing

• Analysis of algorithms: O-notation and its variants, perhaps

some recursion equations, NP-hardness

• Programming: some programming language, ability to do

small experiments reasonably quickly

• Probability: concepts of probability and conditional probability,

expectations, binomial and other simple distributions

• Some linear algebra: e.g., eigenvector and eigenvalue computations

 Above all
• The goal of the course is to learn and enjoy

• The basic principle is to ask questions when

you don’t understand

• Say when things are unclear; not everything

can be clear from the beginning

• Participate in the class as much as possible

 Introduction to data mining
• Why do we need data analysis?

• What is data mining?

• Examples where data mining has been useful

• Data mining and other areas of computer

science and statistics

• Some (basic) data-mining tasks

 Why do we need data analysis

• Really really lots of raw data data!!

– Moore’s law: more efficient processors, larger memories

– Communications have improved too

– Measurement technologies have improved dramatically

– It possible to store and collect lots of raw data

– The data-analysis methods are lagging behind

• Need to analyze the raw data to

extract knowledge
 The data is also very complex
• Multiple types of data: tables, time series,
images, graphs, etc

• Spatial and temporal aspects

• Large number of different variables


• Lots of observations large datasets
 Example: transaction data
• Billions of real-life customers: e.g.,
walmart, safeway customers, etc

• Billions of online customers: e.g.,

amazon, expedia, etc.
 Example: document data
• Web as a document repository: billions of
web pages

• Wikipedia: 4 million articles (and counting)

• Online collections of scientific articles

 Example: network data
• Web: 50 billion pages linked via hyperlinks

• Facebook: 400 million users

• MySpace: 300 million users

• Instant messenger: ~1billion users

• Blogs: 250 million blogs worldwide,

presidential candidates run blogs
 Example: genomic sequences
• http://www.1000genomes.org/page.php

• Full sequence of 1000 individuals


• 310^9 nucleotides per person 310^12
nucleotides

• Lots more data in fact: medical history of

the persons, gene expression data
 Example: environmental data
• Climate data (just an example)
http://www.ncdc.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php

• “a database of temperature, precipitation and

pressure records managed by the National
Climatic Data Center, Arizona State University and
the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center”

• “6000 temperature stations, 7500

precipitation stations, 2000 pressure stations”
 We have large datasets…so what?
• Goal: obtain useful knowledge from large masses of data

• “Data mining is the analysis of (often large)

observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships
and to summarize the data in novel ways that are both
understandable and useful to the data analyst”

• Tell me something interesting about the data; describe

the data

• Exploratory analysis on large datasets

 What can data-mining methods do?
• Extract frequent patterns
– There are lots of documents that contain the phrases
“association rules”, “data mining” and “efficient
algorithm”

• Extract association rules

– 80% of the walmart customers that buy beer
and sausage also buy mustard

• Extract rules
– If occupation=PhD student then income < 20K
 What can data-mining methods do?
• Rank web-query results
– What are the most relevant web-pages to the query: “Student
housing BU”?

• Find good recommendations for users

– Recommend amazon customers new books
– Recommend facebook users new friends/groups

• Find groups of entities that are similar (clustering)

– Find groups of facebook users that have similar friends/interests
– Find groups amazon users that buy similar products
– Find groups of walmart customers that buy similar products
 Goal of this course
• Describe some problems that can be solved using
data-mining methods

• Discuss the intuition behind data-mining methods

that solve these problems

• Illustrate the theoretical underpinnings of

these methods

• Show how these methods can be useful in practice

 Data mining and related areas
• How does data mining relate to
machine learning?

• How does data mining relate to statistics?

• Other related areas?

 Data mining vs machine learning
• Machine learning methods are used for data mining
– Classification, clustering

• Amount of data makes the difference

– Data mining deals with much larger datasets and
scalability becomes an issue

• Data mining has more modest goals

– Automating tedious discovery tasks, not aiming at
human performance in real discovery
– Helping users, not replacing them
 Data mining vs. statistics
• “tell me something interesting about this data” – what
else is this than statistics?

– The goal is similar

– Different types of methods

– In data mining one investigates lot of possible hypotheses

– Data mining is more exploratory data analysis


– In data mining there are much larger datasets
algorithmics/scalability is an issue
 Data mining and databases
• Ordinary database usage: deductive

• Knowledge discovery: inductive

– Inductive reasoning is exploratory

• New requirements for database

management systems

• Novel data structures, algorithms

and architectures are needed
 Data mining and algorithms
• Lots of nice connections

• A wealth of interesting research questions

• We will focus on some of these questions

later in the course
 Some simple data-analysis tasks
• Given a stream or set of numbers (identifiers, etc)

• How many numbers are there?

• How many distinct numbers are there?

• What are the most frequent numbers?

• How many numbers appear at least K times?

• How many numbers appear only once?

• etc
 Finding the majority element
• A neat problem

• A stream of identifiers; one of them occurs

more than 50% of the time

• How can you find it using no more than a

few memory locations?

• Suggestions?
 Finding the majority element
(solution)
• A = first item you see; count = 1
• for each subsequent item B
if (A==B) count = count + 1
else {
count = count - 1
if (count == 0) {A=B; count = 1}
}
endfor
return A
• Why does this work correctly?
 Finding the majority element (solution
and correctness proof)
• A = first item you see; count = 1 • Basic observation:
• for each subsequent item B Whenever we discard
if (A==B) count = count + 1 element u we also
else { discard a unique
count = count - 1 element v different
if (count == 0) from u
{A=B; count = 1}
}
endfor
return A
 Finding a number in the top half
• Given a set of N numbers (N is very large)

• Find a number x such that x is *likely* to

be larger than the median of the numbers

• Simple solution
– Sort the numbers and store them in sorted array A
– Any value larger than A[N/2] is a solution

• Other solutions?
 Finding a number in the top half
efficiently
• A solution that uses small number of operations
– Randomly sample K numbers from the file
– Output their maximum

median

N/2 items N/2 items

• Failure probability (1/2)^K